RepRap Speakers

I get a lot of requests to fly all over the planet to talk about RepRap, which is very kind of people. But I have a policy of accepting no more than one per month of these (otherwise I'd spend my life in airports...).

So the purposes of this topic are threefold:

1. People who know RepRap can post here to volunteer to give talks,
2. People who have received invitations to speak on RepRap and who can't make the date can post the invitation here to see if anyone else can speak in their place, and
3. Conference organisers and others who want speakers can post here to find someone to give a RepRap talk.

I would like to say my policy on money: I always ask for all expenses when I give a talk; if a talk is free for the general public to attend, that's all I charge; if not (for example if a conference is charging admission, or the talk is to the employees of a company), I ask for a fee as well as my expenses. That is not prescriptive; I'm just saying what I do; others may well want to do different.

If a request for a talk is posted here and you take it up, please post saying that you have done so.

The information that a talk invitation should include is:

1. Date (and time, if possible),
2. Location,
3. Details of the inviting person or organisation,
4. Duration of the required talk, and
5. If admission is free to the general public, or not.

Finally, if you give a talk, please upload your slides to the RepRap Wiki here to help other people giving RepRap talks in the future.

Here is the invitation that prompted me to start this topic; I have been talking to Ms Wang since she sent this. I can't go, and she asked if I could find someone else. If you can, please contact Ms Wang and post here so that people can know that the event has been taken care of.

/Digital Art Festival Taipei
[digitalartfestival.tw] has
been /launched in 2006, operated
by Digital Art Foundation and curated by Digital Art Center
Taipei
[www.dac.tw]. After
the past 9 editions, as the only annual digital art
exhibition in
Taiwan, the festival has earned a
pioneering role and wide attention both domestically and
internationally. In /2014 Digital Art
FestivalTaipei －/"Eco-
System", we have the following
artists' participation: Cod.Act, Peter William Holden, Paul
Vanouse,
BeAnotherLab, Lisa Park and
Pinar Yoldas.

With the aim to enrich the diversity of new media art and
digital
culture, Digital Art Foundation
invites Fablab Dynamic as the curatorial team for 2015
Digital Art
Festival Taipei. Fablab Dynamic
is a non-profit organization which emphasizes creation,
openness and
sharing and runs several social
design projects.* *

*
*

*This year, we propose "Digitopia" as the theme of the
festival that
features the ideas of creation,
sharing and community in digital era. We have great
interest in the
ideas and experiences of open
sourced 3D priters and will be extremely excited if we have the
chance to demonstrare the humanity's
first general-purpose self-replicating manufacturing
machine while
making them by the audience at
the same time. Therefore, we sincerely wish to invite you
to lead
the co-working process and host
related forums during the Festival. For further description
on the
festival this year, attached
please find the discourse of festival.*

Many thanks for your kind attention. Please let us know if
you have
any further questions or
thoughts. Look forward to hearing from you.

Great! And I guess a fourth function of this topic could be for people to post trailers for RepRap talks they are giving. We could start a mailing list, but would that achieve anything that we can't do on this forum?

I gave two talks in the last month locally and I collected all the slides i could find on my first google search, but since it wasnt a specially engineering educated crowd I had to keep more general than most of the slides from the reprapwiki link anyway.

Quotesungod3k
I gave two talks in the last month locally and I collected all the slides i could find on my first google search, but since it wasnt a specially engineering educated crowd I had to keep more general than most of the slides from the reprapwiki link anyway.

Anyone interested in coming to the 2016 Midwest RepRap Festival and speaking is always welcome. We have open mic times for the presentation area. The first few years saw Mr. Prusa himself speaking about reprap, last year we had some really cool speakers talking about all sorts of topics, including the guys from E3D who came and talked about the progress of their hotends. So if you've got a project you'd like to come show off, it's free and fun!!! Here's the link www.midwestreprapfest.org

John, I would love to come to the show, but I just can't make the logistics work.

I am now in the second year of teaching how to build a 3D printer. The biggest challenge I see with the industry is the gap between what people think they want to do and what they can actually do. I've been teaching RepRap as a continuum of the design process which includes introduction to the creative tools needed to get ideas from mind to table.

Teaching these classes has been a great experience. It's especially fulfilling when a student designs something from scratch and sees it printing on a printer they built themselves. Compare this to the current trend by consumer printer manufacturers to throw up a section in Home Depot to sell 3D printers and wait for people to flock to the store. Not going to happen. Likewise for the mini 3D, "cloud-based" printers out there, consumers are still at the mercy of picking "pre-engineered" parts and printing them out. Most people I know who are not designers or engineers and have purchased a 3D printer, got tired of it after a week or two. There are only so many cool things one can print from Thingiverse and elsewhere. It's up to us to make the mind portion more applicable to non-technical people.

I will be working with local high schools to build momentum for a more grass-roots approach to 3D printing that doesn't require hundreds of hours of CAD experience on expensive software.

TinkerCad is a great way to get the students past the school and reality politics. Then have a class on the software aspect and a research class. That way they can get something hands on then qualify the pitfalls, gotchas and positives. And Tinkercad is well connected with the next steps to production. They will learn more faster than just sitting and listening to someone that isn't that far ahead. Its all about speed.
I have seen that when young students are able to produce something first then study it out they excel tremendously and are then making better decisions about projects. I have decades under my brim of turning high school students into true marchers and adventurers. And its easy. Put the parts in their hands first and let them form thinking patterns before the theory. It simply works.
It works because it starts out as an open forum where the students are able to fit their skills into the group. Its all about peer pressure. They thrive on it and a forum of focus is a great equalizer. As the forum goes on the kids get to speak about it first. They are highly social creatures and this elevates the geeks above the jocks where there would be no other place. It is great to see a group of people balance out respect with achievement.

I have received another invitation to speak that I cannot go to. If anyone else can go, please respond. Here it is:

-----------------------------

We would like to invite you to deliver a speech at the Maker Forums of the Xi’An International Maker Festival, the first International Maker Festival which will be held between June 24th-26th, 2016 in Xi’An, Shaan Xi ,China.
You will also be welcome to demonstrate any creative workshop or innovation of yours to the public in Xi’an, so that they can also enjoy the pleasure of hands-on creation through your work. At the same time, we will host a variety of forums to enhance communications among international entrepreneur communities.
Limited funds are available for projects that are selected to show.
Please let me know if you have any questions regarding this event. The e-mail for replies is Rongsheng Zhang: info@reprappro.com.cn, but please also post here.
We are looking forward to hearing your response and will be happy to greet you in Xi 'An!